GTA 6: 2.56 million UK workers plan to take launch day off, Uswitch survey finds
Uswitch surveyed 1,000 UK workers who play video games and estimates 2.56 million will be away from work on November 19, 2026 for GTA 6: 1.68 million on annual leave and 887,515 on sick leave despite not being ill, worth £403.5 million of working time at the UK median hourly pay of £19.67.
The short answer
GTA VI could keep 2.56 million UK workers away from their jobs on November 19, 2026, according to a survey commissioned by the comparison site Uswitch and reported by Advanced Television on October 20. Of that total, 1.68 million would use annual leave and 887,515 would take sick leave despite not being unwell. Uswitch prices the missing hours at £403.5 million, and every figure rests on self-reported intentions rather than employer records.
What Uswitch actually measured
The sample was 1,000 UK workers who play video games, polled for a broadband comparison site whose expert, Max Beckett, used the findings to remind readers to check download speeds and console storage before launch. That commercial context matters less than the data: 54% of respondents said they plan to change their working schedule on release day.
The rest of the breakdown, as published by Advanced Television: 17% would consider annual leave, 9% might take sick leave while not unwell, and 14% may take unpaid leave. Another 21% expect to be tired at work after playing late, 21% expect to be distracted, 26% expect to spend time discussing the game with colleagues, 17% may move their hours and 16% expect to be less productive. Among respondents working from home, 30% said they may play during working time.
Where 2.56 million comes from — and the base nobody printed
This is the link in the chain that most coverage dropped. Seventeen per cent of the UK's roughly 34.5 million employees would be close to 5.9 million people, not 1.68 million. Dividing 1.68 million by 17%, and 887,515 by 9%, points instead to a base of between 9.86 and 9.88 million workers who play games — about 28.6% of the workforce, which is a plausible share of British adults who touch a controller.
That base is the only reading under which the published absolutes hold together, and it fits the sample: gamers, not the general population. RockstarINTEL, reporting the study on October 23, places the 34,500,000 employee denominator next to the 1.68 million annual-leave figure, and the two cannot both be right — the percentages were applied to gamers, then the result was described as if it covered everyone.
So the defensible headline is narrower than "2.56 million Britons skipping work": roughly one in four UK workers who play games intends to be off on launch day. For a video game, that remains remarkable.
13.4 million hours or 20.5 million?
Uswitch's own arithmetic is explicit: on an eight-hour day, 20,511,464 hours potentially missed across annual and sick leave, priced with the UK full-time median hourly pay of £19.67 as a proxy. That yields £263.8 million of annual leave plus £139.7 million of "sick" leave, £403.5 million in total — and the totals reconcile only at 20,511,464 hours, since 20,511,464 × £19.67 = £403.5 million.
RockstarINTEL instead reports "a little more than 13,400,000 hours of work lost", which is exactly annual leave alone (1.68 million × 8 hours = 13.44 million) with the sick-leave hours left out, while still quoting the £403.5 million total. The discrepancy is about 7.1 million hours. By Uswitch's own count, one day of missed work equals 2,341 years of continuous labour.
£403.5 million is not £403.5 million of damage
The distinction matters, because the number travels faster than the method behind it. Uswitch uses median hourly pay "as a proxy for the economic value of those working hours": it prices the time, it does not measure a loss. And £263.8 million of the total is booked annual leave — paid, planned and approved weeks in advance. Nobody's output vanishes because someone takes a holiday they are entitled to.
Only the £139.7 million sick-leave portion is unplanned, and even that is a deferral rather than a deletion: work skipped on a Thursday tends to be done on a Friday. On the other side of the ledger, the same launch will move real money, with Take-Two expected to book billions in first-week revenue. The US estimate from economist José Montalvo, reported separately, puts that country's productivity hit near $1 billion — another projection, not a measurement.
How it compares with the American figures
Three separate datasets now point the same way, which is why the story keeps resurfacing. BambooHR, drawing on 3.4 million US employees plus a survey of 1,500 salaried workers, reported on October 19 that paid-time-off requests for November 19 are running 13% above equivalent days in 2024 and 2025, with 18% of salaried workers planning the day off — and 32% of Gen Z employees.
A GameSquare/Pollfish poll of 1,000 full-time employed US gamers found 10% planning to skip work outright, another 30% considering it, and 42% expecting to be less productive. A separate UK survey by One Day Agency, published in September, found 15% of workers would call in sick if they could not book leave — higher than Uswitch's 9%, although the questions differ: "would if unable" is not "may".
Scale deserves a note. The UK's 2.56 million is 7.4% of the national workforce. The 1.5 million US figure, cited in IBTimes UK's coverage of Montalvo's estimate, is under 1% of a workforce roughly five times larger — and IBTimes itself cautions that the 1.5 million headcount circulated in launch coverage without being attributed directly to Montalvo's interview. The gap is methodological, not cultural.
What is confirmed, and what is not
Confirmed: GTA VI releases on November 19, 2026 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, and Uswitch's percentages and totals were published on October 20. Unconfirmed, and probably unconfirmable: how many people actually fail to turn up. Every verb in the study is conditional — "would consider", "may take". No UK employer dataset exists to check the result against, and the trade-press version of the survey carries no fieldwork dates and no margin of error.
What can be said is that employers now plan around the date. California tuner Burger Motorsports told customers its support and shipping would slow for several days from November 19, and Australia's Fair Work Ombudsman has issued a public reminder that a game launch is not a valid reason for paid leave — a warning that would have been absurd in 2013, when GTA V sold 11.21 million copies in 24 hours and nobody thought to publish one.
